BikerRated is brought to you by the creator of Visordown and former Editor of RiDE magazine’s RiDER Power survey.
It started with a conversation among a group of biking friends. We all hated the fact that when it comes to buying bike gear you either take a punt or instead you have to do a lot of research.
If you do your research, you have to get up to speed on the sort of features you should be looking for, the latest materials and components, then trawl through all the options before making a purchase. It can be a minefield and take a long time.
We realised that thousands of bikers go through the same process and we wanted to help you save time and improve the quality of the gear you bought.
Then when it comes to reviews, it’s hard to believe all the owner reviews. Some people leave a 5-star review because the helmet they just bought arrived on time, others leave a 1-star review because they can’t remove the visor. Who to trust?
And so it clicked. What if we could launch a website that meant bikers didn’t have to do all the legwork? They can just read one guide, quickly get up to speed, see a good selection of options and remove the risk of making a bad purchase.
So we launched BikerRated – a curation of the best riding gear and gadgets for bikers who would rather be out riding, than sat in front of a computer researching.
This site has been set up by Ben, the same guy that founded Visordown back in the year 2000. A former RiDER Power Editor and motorcycle journalist, he has industry-wide contacts and has put together countless product features and tests in motorcycle magazines over the last decade. He knows a good product from a dud.
We have made it our mission to bring you up to speed on any product you’re looking to purchase and show you a wide range of products that we rate. The reward for us is that some of the products earn us a commission from trusted retailers who run affiliate schemes.
Our recommendations are always made entirely by our editorial team and in most cases, the testers aren’t made aware of the product’s price, so they can judge it on its merits – we can then weigh that up against the price at the end.
How do you choose the products you review?
If we only featured the best products, almost everything we rated would be at the high end of the price scale and therefore not a lot of use to most people. There are hundreds of great products that would never get a look in.
That’s why we carefully choose different price-points, to ensure that the best products always come to the surface and that’s one of the parts that requires the most work.
Our shortlists takes hours of research, we scour the internet landscape to establish all the features a good product should have. We check out user reviews to see what real-world riders are looking for in their gear. We produce a longlist of all the gear that meets the criteria, we then whittle this down to a shortlist and take it from here.
Further to our own experience, we enlist the help of industry experts to input advice and tips to help make our tests the best out there. The result is a list of products we’d recommend to our friends, the same bike gear we’d choose for ourselves.
Do affiliate commissions make you biased?
Not all of the products we showcase can be bought from a retailer that has an affiliate scheme but it makes sense for us to link to the ones that do, as that’s how we earn our revenue which funds our research.
If our readers choose to buy products that we’ve recommended as a result of our research, these purchases are (but not always) supported through a commission from the retailer when they make a purchase. If you return your purchase because you think we’ve made a bad recommendation, then we don’t make any commission – so there’s no point in us choosing a product that is inferior or us buckling to pressure from the manufacturers. We’ll end up with a poor reputation and no revenue to keep testing the gear in the way we want to.
If you do want to buy one of the products featured, buying it through one of our links is your way of saying thank you to us for saving you time and helping you make a better purchase. We’re grateful to you if you do that but you’re free to buy from anywhere you like.
We’re built on trust
The foundation this site is built on is: trust from our readers. If we were biased or wrote poor articles, you wouldn’t support our work. We lay out our articles in a clear manner to walk you through the buying and testing process, so you can draw your own conclusions and choose the best product. We also know our reviews can always get better, so we’re constantly working on how we can improve each test or guide to make your life easier. If you have any suggestions, drop us an email using the contact form.
Happy riding!
Ben & the BikerRated team
